


My Affliction

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, POV Sherlock Holmes, Post Reichenbach, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-29
Updated: 2013-12-29
Packaged: 2018-01-06 14:58:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1108210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Sherlock Holmes returns and John Watson is indecisive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Affliction

You’re leaving; I understand. This isn’t the outcome I hoped for, but the outcome I predicted nevertheless. No matter. At least now I can be comforted by the thought that you will start afresh - without me, just as you had planned - but at now you don’t have the burden of mourning the body of a man that is still sickeningly warm. Perhaps I should just let you go and fade into the intoxicating streets of our city, content with the knowledge that you are content without me. But I am not a selfless man.

You’re shrugging on your coat and refusing to meet my eyes. You have been since the initial jolt so many hours ago - our gazes locked for the first time in three years and I felt alive for the first time in as many. If you leave now I will never look into your eyes again. I could stride from my position of false indifference at the window and hook a finger under your chin, force your face upwards towards mine. I could lower my hand with the knowledge that you then wouldn’t dare look away, or I could stroke gentle shapes of nonsense on the side of your cheek with my thumb.

I could ease your jacket carefully off your shoulders and hook it back deliberately onto the hook; you wouldn’t object, I know. You would turn to face me and I would make you tea so we could sit and watch bad TV together until we fell asleep, or I would walk towards you until you were backed against the doorframe and I wound tenderly press my mouth to yours. Everything could be exactly the same as it was or everything could be completely different but neither of us would mind. A lot can change in three long years, but not enough to completely pull me away from you.

I’m looking out of the window now and breathing uneven blooms of condensation onto the glass, but I can hear you doing up the zip on your coat. I could say quite simply “no,” and this horribly suffocating tension would crack under the force of one syllable. I would breathe once, twice more onto the glass before brushing away the moisture with the heel of my palm and asking you to stay here with me. To never leave me, to never walk away from my existence again because I need you as much as I need cases or nicotine or thinking. I know that you wouldn’t ever be able to refuse me, and that is my curse.

Your hand is on the door handle now and I can hear your slight huff of breath. You’re indecisive, like me, and you know that this is one final hurdle you will only be able to cross once. Good. Feel the hurt that has entwined itself between every sinew in my body that knows your name. As you press on the handle it squeaks quietly - three years and no decent maintenance will corrupt nearly everything, including me and you - as if it knows exactly of this last act of independence, as if it is screaming at us to stop painfully unpicking every one of the disjointed and messy stitches that I thought would hold us together until death. Apparently a staged one is enough to tear us apart.

The door shuts softly behind you and it frustrates me that our ultimate farewell is so anticlimactic. We were never designed to live without the other, don’t you see? It’s funny how it wasn’t a bullet or an explosion or a homicidal maniac that finally caused us to part. It was me. I could cross the room in three shaky strides and throw open the door to call you back to me. I could drive my nails sharply into your wrist and drag you back towards me so we are chest to chest, toe to toe, and remind you with every forceful compress of my lips that this is the wrong decision. I could throw myself after you so we both end up at the foot of the stairs with matching concussions and you would laugh and I would offer you a bed for the night. Mine. 

I hear the front door stutter closed below me and I notice that I am no longer breathing. I could contact a member of the homeless network to stage a heart attack outside the flat so you would rush to their aid, to throw themselves under a bus. I could run out there myself into the bitter night, underdressed and shivering and you would look at the stutter of my breathing, the tremor of my fingers and take pity on me, usher me back into the warmth of our once-shared haven and run your hands again and again against my upper arms until I had stopped shaking.

It’s not too late to reach you, to bury my face into the side of your neck until genuine tears wet your skin and I actually beg for your forgiveness. Because I would, for you. It’s not too late to encompass your broken form in my arms and press my forehead to yours until we are breathing the same air and you understand that without you, I have no purpose. Without you, I am as good as a warm body in cold, dead earth. That’s all it would take, I know, to be forgiven. To have you return to my side so we can be fantastic, brilliant, amazing once again.

I’m still standing at this window, watching you walk away and forgetting how to breathe, but I could so easily prevent you from being absorbed into the hostile blackness that envelops this city, from walking away from a life together.

But I am not a selfish man.


End file.
